


Rimfire

by cognomen



Category: Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: M/M, Post-Movie(s), Silva Lives fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-08 04:45:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3195794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>James scoffs. His eyes find the winking, nodding head of the ceramic bulldog still adorning Mallory's desk, now trembling ever so slightly as if in response to the tension in the room.</i>
</p><p>  <i>Mallory stays silent, standing too. He is refusing to relent from the possibility of James' anger, and he had, at  least, delivered the information in person. James respects the balls that takes. He also wants to rip them off and jam them into the nodding bulldog's hollow head.</i></p><p>  <i>Instead he summons indignant composure, as if Mallory were making only another hollow threat.</i></p><p>  <i>"Are you serving me discharge papers?" James asks, measuring incredulity into his tone like the drip I.V. so recently attached to his arm. </i></p><p>-</p><p>For the 00Silva gift exchange, recipient <a href="http://sfumatosoups.tumblr.com/"> sfumatosoups</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mechanicaljewel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mechanicaljewel/gifts), [sfumatosoup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sfumatosoup/gifts).



James scoffs. His eyes find the winking, nodding head of the ceramic bulldog still adorning Mallory's desk, now trembling ever so slightly as if in response to the tension in the room.

Mallory stays silent, standing too. He is refusing to relent from the possibility of James' anger, and he had, at least, delivered the information in person. James respects the balls that takes. He also wants to rip them off and jam them into the nodding bulldog's hollow head.

Instead he summons indignant composure, as if Mallory were making only another hollow threat.

"Are you serving me discharge papers?" James asks, measuring incredulity into his tone like the drip I.V. so recently attached to his arm.

Mallory sighs and James is suddenly aware, with the cold water sensation of his own slowing vitals, that this is real.

"Will you accept a position in support or instruction?" Mallory asks, daring James to accept in a clever ploy. 

It is enough to let Bond consider it for a moment, to be the voice of experience or the reassuring presence on the other end of the earpiece, but he knows he isn't cut out for it. No desk job would contain him, no vicarious excitement could _sustain_ him. James Bond is not a creature for captivity.

"No," he says, tipping his chin up.

Mallory has the cheek to look relieved - glad to have James fully out of his hair. Glad that James won't test him by taking a position to call his bluff.

"Then yes, 007, I'm prepared to hand you your severance," he says, his hand falling splay-fingered on a manilla envelope. He pushes it across the desk to James.

Bond makes no move to take it. It is a childish gesture, an obstinate one but he does not care. Mallory raises his eyes from the folder he has pushed toward James and frowns.

"A bad shoulder," he says, his tone even as if this were fair,"a bad leg-"

"If I were a horse you'd shoot me," James interrupts, bitter irony in his tone.

Mallory's features do not lose their stern resolution, his voice raising only by a hair. "James, no number of laps in the pool, no matter how many chin ups you punish yourself with, none of it will sponge away your past."

James resists the urge to drop his hand against the fresher injury in his thigh, where even now he feels the strain of standing too long. Mallory pushes the folder to the edge of the desk nearest to Bond.

"Take it, 007. Live comfortably. Fuck women in Buenos Aires or Paris or retire to Martha's Vineyard for all I care, but take it. You're not too old for a family, you know."

It is meant to tempt him, to get James to reach out for the folder. Within him, he could not feel any sharper of a recoil. Mallory has never been an agent, though James knows he has not always been a desk man. He has never drowned in love only to drown the ability within himself to be better as a tool.

James takes the folder. Mallory will call security if he has to, in numbers enough to prove to Bond why he needs dismissal. 

But the taste in his mouth is as bitter as the ink he signs with, letting his hands it so heavy on Mallory's fountain pen that the tines split and bend and the ink floods.

He _signs_.

-

James tries to weather the storm as a well-ruffled bird might. He perches in his armchair in old, comfortable clothes that hang loose from his frame with too many washes.

His new apartment is barely furnished, his old life had been scoured away while he lay in this own ashes and since his reinstatement, he has been occupied. Running onward, case to case, staving the march of years.

At the time, he had felt reborn, phoenix like, and tested by fires and failures.

In the two years it's been since he's worked for Mallory, refurnishing his apartment past the functional essentials - a chair, a desk, a laptop, a couch that would fold into a bed if he ever bothered - has hardly been a priority. He has at least acquired a cabinet for his vices - now laid open like a woman's robe and showing its inner folds, lined deeply with bottles in tea-brown and green glass. Dark liquids.

He drinks a familiar vintage now, watching the dark over the city. He pretends the remaining lights of late-night London are the stars and constellations. The clouds are too low and heavy for real stars today.

No potential occupies his quiet, clever mind. No opportunities intersect the future that he can see. It is not that he cannot make something new out of himself, but rather a stubborn unwillingness to retreat.

It is melting down a katana to make teaspoons. Worthy, perhaps, but wasteful.

James had never expected to retire - he had thought his only tomb would be a name left carved in marble in the venerable halls of MI6.

Instead, he considers himself buried alive in a coffin of four walls and sparse, tasteful furniture.

More whiskey. The world blurs. He swims in his own sensations, restless, until the taste on his tongue drags up a memory. 

Strong cologne, expensive; vetiver and tobacco and violet. Fresh smoke, burnt gunpowder. Spilled whiskey. Spilled blood. Soft whispers.

James has an abysmal record with rescuing damsels. More whiskey. James isn't a knight, isn't a prince. His license is to kill, not to save. His license is to kill, not to save. He is a 00 - or _was_. Yet, despite pride in the lack of the heroic definition of either specific function that would make him a savior, he held the idea as valuable. _Vesper._

 _That_ makes him restless enough to get up. To ignore the slow spin-and-jerk his vision is giving and prowl. There is no aim in it, save to move unseen and potentially dangerous through familiar dark, wet streets. A caged animal pacing the dimensions of its bars. He moves in the blocks of road over the temporary MI6 headquarters. He circles it, pacing the square of streets - old, cobbled things that would jounce a car's suspension. This is old London, narrow roads once meant for carriages.

That the bars keep him out and not in matter little to this tiger. They still constrict. 

James circuits it again, goes round over the shiny cobblestones and wonders if he's being watched. If anyone other than the digital eye watches over MI6 anymore.

Perhaps in the morning, having his first cup of Earl Gray, Q will watch James on his monitors, the little shit.

He gets his answer.

"Sir," it's not an agent. Just uniformed officer, a patrolman with a checkered band on his cap. "Have you lost something?"

 _Yes,_ , James thinks, _a sense of order in the world_.

"Missing a wedding ring," he lies smoothly, just to feel the tick and trick of fooling another human for a little while. James adds a sheepish smile, displaying his ringless right hand. "My wife won't hold it against me, but I'm upset with myself you see."

The officer nods, giving him an answering conspiratorial smile.

"You've been at it for hours, sir. Better to file a report. I'm sorry to say the street sweepers were through this afternoon." The patrolman's tone is apologetic. He has a ring on his own finger.

James makes the appropriate exclamations of ill luck, promises to file a report, and finally excuses himself. He may have fooled the patrolman, but he knows Mallory will see - or has seen.

He waits for the reaction his actions demand - for the phone call or letter telling him to desist, for a warning against his behavior. 

Mallory does not play the same games as M. No phone call comes.

-

James becomes attuned to the quiet in the next few weeks, aware of the stretches where it lasts and lasts, putting him harder to the edge than he'd ever imagined. Quiet cannot just _be_ quiet, it's moments before ambush, before gunfire and explosions. 

It is a tightening gear in him, a wheel lock that ratchets tighter and tighter and refuses to ease. He feels an urge, a maddening one, to volunteer himself into military service or to mercenary himself. 

He is too lame for either, of course. An ache in his thigh where the latest bullet had lodged deep reminds him. It matches the old pain in his shoulder. It endures through rest and exercise both, warming up only to neutrality at the middle of either before descending back into pain with too much of one or the other.

Bond never feels 'good' anymore, not in the way he would have described it in his earliest days as an agent. His steps are heavy, if graceful. His movements calculated for efficiency, when he can manage. He is still however, effective, or so he would argue while he punishes himself with pushups, laps in the pool. With bottles of whiskey consumed too quickly to taste how fine they are, truly.

It hardly matters. Not the exercise, not the drinks. It doesn't ease the strange burden of unencumberment. It cannot return the way James has learned to define himself to him. It doesn't sooth his anger.

It's only three weeks after his discharge that inactivity itches so strangely and so deeply beneath his skin that James feels his urge to misbehave rise up suddenly in him.

The petulant child kicking up a fuss for attention, embedded somewhere deep in his soul so that he must face it flailing and yelling and try to give enough shits to remember why he should logic this infant of his mind back to complacency.

Bond finds he has a deficiency of both shits and whiskey.

He grows the plan in his mind quickly - he knows enough, remembers enough, has the training; he does not need to dwell on his thought until he is certain the plan will succeed. 

He does not care if it does or not, it is the prospect of action that will satisfy him. How far he has come, that his goal is simply to _do_ rather than to succeed with excellence. Being outstanding had only brought James here. Perhaps in this case, being mediocre would bring him further.

James pulls on his holster, eases it under a jacket he has not worn in a long time - it boasts a sporting goods manufacturer's logo, in poor taste for everything but wind breakers and sweats. He hits the street - taking the back door out, the one that leads into the close halls between the apartment units, for maids and maintenance to access. It is difficult, James thinks, but not impossible to monitor. It's too intimate for immediate supervision unless they had bought one of the maids.

Cameras - cameras are cheap these days, digital and discreet - no longer requiring even infrequent maintenance to replace the recording media. Truly the days of human spying were perhaps drawing to a close. 

James goes out the back anyway, emerging into the bar at the lobby and ducking out of the 'employees only' corridor before anyone can try to point out that he isn't one. 

No one notices. It is an hour of the night when no one looks up. the worlds that exist for them are separate and uniquely flavored - universes in whiskey, beer, vodka tinted orange with juice. 

James does not manage to orbit so wide that the bar's combined gravity - a hundred galaxies in colored glass - does not pull him in. He pauses to explain what contents he wants in a glass to the bartender.

"Three measures gin, one Vodka and a half a measure of Kina Lillet," he says.

The old man behind the counter gives James a bland look and gives him a Martini of the standard order that has been neither shaken nor stirred. It is not cold. For all that, it goes down well, and James drinks it quickly for courage. 

Then he pays and goes before the black hole density of the place can trap him.

James retraces steps he has taken once, though he is careful of tails. He finds he is not followed. Perhaps that stings the most, that Mallory does not consider him a threat.

He moves through the underground sliding into trains, and out of them again, until he finds himself in King's Cross. Curiosity possesses him and he walks to the section of upper platform that had been damaged those years ago, inspecting the construction. Wooden horses hold up signs warning the platform is closed, and noting the expected completion date. James can see down into the bones of the structure, a skeleton built between the upper and lower area. He is backtracking his steps, following a path in reverse.

Fully expecting to find roadblocks and encounter remedies to the faults in security, James runs up against nothing.

Nothing, he supposes, but a locked door on an active train line tunnel and not enough faith in timing to feel his life was not at risk.

James does not have to put his back into it this time, but he is going into this alone, no voices easing him through on an earpiece. James' shoulder and leg both give warning twinges as he pulls the door open, sticking on its little used hinges. It swings inwards, and his ears pick up the whine of the tracks just before the slamming sound of a train cutting the air. It passes - safely on the other side of the door - in a rush, James watching the faces go by with disinterested expressions. They do not look up.

James shakes his head and thinks of ghosts. He pulls the door shut behind the departing train. He goes on memory and feel, counting steps until he finds the access port that should take him up into the lowest levels of MI6's underground facility. At the top of the ladder is a reinforced plexiglass door - a hatch really - equipped with a cross bar lock like a submarine. 

James expects this to be the end of his endeavor - he has not considered past this step, what he will do if he gains access to MI6. Likely, be very quickly apprehended. 

He checks the access panel, glancing at the array of numbers, the quick-access card scanner, and he makes a face. _Technology_.

James wonders if prying off the panel would have the result he wanted. He digs his pocket knife out and opens the blade.

Then, in a moment of whimsy, James punches in M's date of birth.

The lock clicks, hydraulic levers withdrawing the cross bolts and then swinging up, opening the lowest levels of MI6 to him. 

Inside, it is dark. Distantly illuminated as if there was a light on in another room. James hauls himself up through the trap door, and finds something to jam into it, to keep his escape route open. Old habits. 

His surroundings are familiar - the light is from this room, just dimmed nearly to blue darkness. A cell - constructed of heavy duty clear plexiglass - round, familiar.

It isn't empty.

"Hello, James," the voice is soft, tired, but not without its usual singsong tone or the softly rounded vowels. It stops James cold, pulls his attention toward the cell and the figure he only now sees - very still, patient - within. 

-


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Silva is propped up on a gurney, reclined comfortable on the lifted head portion. The bed itself - James supposes that's what it must serve for - is made of tough, white plastic. Hard to break and even more difficult to construct a weapon from. James supposes that its presence - the presence of anything more than the sole chair that had occupied the space when last he'd seen it - is a sign of good behavior.
> 
> It takes a moment to take it all in - he looks twice to be certain that it is not just familiar aspects painting too heavy a suggestion. The coy smile is the same, the eyes bright and interested. The bleach is falling out of his hair, revealing long, dark roots beneath. The cut is more utilitarian from his captivity. He is clothed in a subdued grey jumpsuit.

Silva is propped up on a gurney, reclined comfortable on the lifted head portion. The bed itself - James supposes that's what it must serve for - is made of tough, white plastic. Hard to break and even more difficult to construct a weapon from. James supposes that its presence - the presence of anything more than the sole chair that had occupied the space when last he'd seen it - is a sign of good behavior.

It takes a moment to take it all in - he looks twice to be certain that it is not just familiar aspects painting too heavy a suggestion. The coy smile is the same, the eyes bright and interested. The bleach is falling out of his hair, revealing long, dark roots beneath. The cut is more utilitarian from his captivity. He is clothed in a subdued grey jumpsuit. 

All of it is an insult to his style, and yet he wears the merits of his captivity imperiously, with a smile. It is only when James steps closer, drawn as if by magnetism, that it feels real. It is somehow less of a surprise to find Silva alive as it is to discover him in captivity.

"You've come to visit me at last," Silva says, amused by James' appearance.

James tucks his hands into his pockets as if he hadn't just come up through the emergency bolt hole, and he glances toward the closed door in the outer room.

"That purpose was not at the top of my list for coming," James tells him.

Silva tilts his head, tapping the grease pencil in his hand against the paper held on a clipboard in his lap. It seems lackadaisical to James - sitting in bed doing work with a crayon in MI6's basement. 

"You didn't know," Silva decides, after measuring him. He clucks his tongue. "Your new daddy has been keeping secrets."

"He's not-" James begins, goaded in spite of himself.

Silva's mouth curls up at the edges, twitching into a smile that reminds James of how grotesque Silva's mouth can be.

"Well, here we are," Silva says. "Both dismissed from service."

James lets him talk, uninterested in carrying more of the burdensome conversation than he has to. Silva is here. He's alive. For whatever reason, Mallory had seen fit not to tell James. It lends a couple of notions to his memory, as he circles the big, plexiglass cell. Not around and around like an animal but just once, slow.

"There is a guard outside the door, James, though I have convinced them I am a much tamer creature these days," Silva continues, pencil tapping a slow, even rhythm against the page. "Now that my revenge is served."

"Why do they keep you?" James asks, glad Silva had chosen 'creature' and not taken the opportunity to stretch the 'R' in 'rat' into a lewd growl. 

"You mean, a secret?"

"I mean _alive_ ," James returns, blandly. 

Silva chuckles, and he looks up over James' shoulder. James knows there are several cameras in the room, that he can only expect security to be so lax before they notice James and come for him.

He wonders if they'd find him a little hidden cell like this one, and how long it would take him to go mad in it.

"Can you still walk?" The question is curiosity. James had been aiming for the spine, but at the time he had satisfied himself with 'good enough'. 

"Are you offering to rescue me?" Silva sounds pleased.

"Wondering if I severed your spine," James answers, smiling. 

Silva chuckles and sets the pencil aside, resting it on a low, clear plastic bedside table. He makes a show - without breaking eye contact - of throwing off the blanket.

"Such concern for your handiwork, James," Silva purrs.

Beneath the blankets his legs do not have the thin, wasted look of paralyzed limbs. Silva groans and stretches, unfolding himself onto his feet with a pointed show of agility. It is overdone - there is a tightness in Silva's back from the way he moves, a tenderness that he will never heal from. He is as damaged as James. 

"Shame," James says.

"I don't hold it against you," Silva responds. He has no pockets, but he folds his hands together behind his back instead.

"I was just finishing up what you had already started."

"Your timing was abysmal."

James supposes it was. He had not, after all, saved M. Nothing would have, by that point. He had spared her her dignity, perhaps. A thought creeps in that perhaps also, he had spared her more wayward 'son'. He dismisses it - he had not intended to.

"Well you can't go out the front, James, and soon they will realize you have come in the back, hmm?" Silva prompts, dropping his tone into suggestion.

"Were you behind that entry code?"

"Yes."

James sighs. It has not been ten minutes, quite. It will not be ten seconds once he steps out of this oubliette. Here he came against the mien of his plan - did he fail spectacularly and take his chance to spit at Mallory's feet? He would not get another, he was certain.

And yet here was a chance to succeed at something, to force Mallory to do more than brush him off. In this moment, where James cares very little if he lives or dies, he decides. There is a thumbprint reader on the inset door, a retinal device.

"Will it work on this?" James asks, watching the rat inside the cage smile. He had seen, once, that a study conducted on lab rats had shown them to have compassion for trapped compatriots, forgoing even the reward of food to help free them. 

"Try it," Silva says, "and see."

-

MI6 is damnably slow in pursuit. Silva moves from memory at James' side, correcting his course where it goes wandering until they come out into the new construction, the wreckage of the old station. He chuckles - no police uniform to disguise him this time, but his soft soled shoes are whisper quiet, his outfit not so different from a janitor's. 

At this hour of the very early morning, he and James move unseen, ducking out beneath the caution tape and stepping onto a train at random.

"Do you have a stash laid up for getaway?" Silva hisses in his ear, leaning in close and ignoring James' displeasure, "A car?"

"I _had_ one," James reminds. He cannot resist adding, " _You_ blew it up."

Silva looks chagrined but not repentant. 

"I seem to recall you took specific vengeance on my Helicopter, James," Silva answers, smiling at his own reflection in the darkened train window.

"A very poor trade," James answers sharply. He spares a fond thought for the car, supposing he might have done the same, if their positions had been in the reverse. 

"What will we do?" Silva asks, and James wakes that old dormant think-on-his-feet aspect of his brain, feeling it stretch to life. 

"Combine our assets," James suggests. It's a risk - he has only what he carries on his person, and even if most of their escape had gone unseen, time worked against them. He does not dare a return to his apartment, and his safe-houses are registered with MI6 - all but the one he had raided in trying to save M.

The train stops and they exit, Silva leading the way with such silent confidence that James is compelled to follow. He has little doubt that Silva had prepared for a number of eventualities, that being held captive for far longer or taken alive again were eventualities he had provided for.

He is a survivor, much as he hates it. He knows what it is to live with no chance of escape, and now he does not fall into barrels without back doors. 

"When I knew that she would send you after me, James," Silva explains, moving confidently out of the station through a turnstile with his face turned away from the camera station. "I prepared for several eventualities."

"I hope one includes a car," James answers, not in the mood for such flowery explanation. 

Silva laughs. Outside, the streets are dark and the air heavy with wet.

"You aren't foolishly carrying any devices assigned to you, are you James?"" Silva asks.

The gun is his own, his damnable cell phone and its attendant retinue of gadgets remain at the kitchen counter in his mostly empty apartment. The rest are long since surrendered back to MI6 - and they have a careful memory.

"No," James answers. It makes him feel suddenly more exposed, but sharper, "I haven't even got my house keys." 

One gun, one pocket knife. An uncluttered wallet. Change for the tube, now mostly expended.

"No little _radios_?" Silva rolls the sound in pleasure.

"Nothing that would have spoiled my game early," James confirms. He is not such an idiot as Silva chooses to think of him. 

"Good."

Silva turns left sharply and suddenly the road seems to terminate. It's one of London's many reworked alleys, the city closing in strangely on itself over the years as it was worked and reworked, burned and bombed and built over. 

"Why are you still alive?" James asks at last, unable to contain the question. It should not matter to him, these hows and whys, only the concrete reality. But he is curious by nature - even enough to cater to Silva's vanity by asking.

"Because your knife missed my spine and heart," Silva observes, pulling a cobblestone up with his fingers. It's taking long enough that James relents, offering his pocket knife as a lever. "And because your MI6 medics are very good."

He accepts the knife, clucking at it - a smaller, utilitarian affair. James would hardly offer him a bigger one, even if he had brought one.

"I mean, why didn't they hang you?" James presses.

Silva eases the blade alongside the stone he has been working up, then levers it the rest of the way out of its space. He shows his perfect, even, white - _plastic_ \- teeth in a grimace at the effort. When he pries the stone all the way up at last, there is a key in a clear lunch bag pressed into the fill beneath. He pulls it out, dropping the stone back into place. 

"A better question is why they made any effort to save me at all, James," Silva reminds him. 

James does not correct himself at Silva's suggestion. 

Silva takes they key, discarding the plastic bag, and leaves the short alley. It seems untouched - any of a hundred like it in this square mile of southern London. Around the corner is a large, brick warehouse. The windows are dark and grimy, the place looking long unused. A pair of great barn doors at one end suggest that perhaps it had once been a stock barn or livery.

It is padlocked closed, the doors chained together. James wonders if someone watches it to deter break ins.

"The answer is that they have already begun to experience the eventualities I arranged - periodic, systematic, randomized attacks or information leaks," Silva explains. The doors swing outward and James helps to get one open while Silva pulls the other. 

"They come from no central location, but rather have their origins in an adaptive, pervasive piece of programming," Silva continues.

"A virus," James simplifies.

Silva shakes his head as if he is faced with a variety of extinct animal. 

"If that's how you understand it," he chuckles, and there is pity in his tone. "But it is timed, and of course, only I know how to anticipate it to stop the process. I made myself indispensable, so long as I was alive."

"And if you weren't?" James asks, stepping into the dark of the warehouse.

Silva shrugs. It does not matter to him - he had been willing to die to see M pay but prepared if he did not. Prepared to take back a place in MI6, by any means necessary, and _any_ place was better than none.

James, of course, cannot judge. In the old stables they reveal the gleaming gunmetal silver curves of an Aston Martin DB10, and James has even less to say about that.

-

James is unused to occupying the passenger's seat, to feeling a car's power without the wheel under his fingers, the stick under his palm. He discovers it to be an anxious feeling, with Silva operating the vehicle. 

MI6 has at last found them - James is not totally certain how - and the chase pounds through his veins. It is a release that has been building up in him, all that quiet that he had so hated at last shattering into the sound of gunfire. 

It's a welcome sound. James pulls his gun, settling it into his lap. The Walther is a familiar weight along his thigh, though he can hope to do very little with two dozen rounds in a high speed car chase. Silva handles the car well, scraping them around tight turns while the engine screams in top gear, a satisfying growl as he uses the pull of the car's front wheel drive to take them where they need to be. He watches the chase cars lag behind them, unwilling to be as reckless as Silva on the narrow country roads.

They will soon be more intensely pursued. MI6's resources, especially in the heart of England, were considerable. She would not be embarrassed in her own territory.

Silva's hand suddenly settles heavy on James' leg, balancing the weight of the gun on his other. His fingers spread wide to cover as much territory as possible, a sliding motion over the top of James' thigh calling deliberate attention to the gesture.

As if James could have ignored it. He shoots Silva a dirty look but finds the man seemingly absorbed in driving, not watching James for his effect. For a moment, it throws him. It is a touch that is intimate, certainly but that seems grounding, seems to draw James out of his haze and into the moment. His actions become real, and the consequences he has committed to gather together in his mind.

Then Silva presses his luck, his fingers moving further to slide against James' clothed crotch, beneath the termination of his zipper. This time James’ hands are free. He pushes Silva away, and a rich chuckle answers.

"You don't find it exciting?" Silva asks, though he does retrieve his hand before James breaks it. "You've made us partners now."

James sighs, finding the truth no less burdensome for being true. "It was something to do."

Silva laughs, and there is an edge of mania to it - sharper and harder than the whimsical madness James had known in him. Stillness and captivity have not suited him either, and he has endured it for longer than James.

"Your plans to make yourself useful," James asks, raising his voice to be heard over the car's engine. "What was the end goal?"

Silva rounds a corner in the rural countryside, the tires of the sports car crunching suddenly on dirt and gravel, and James realizes the sounds of pursuit had vanished behind them. The road behind them fades quickly from view.

He slows the car to a halt, leaving them surrounded by old, tall forest. James steps out onto what seems to be little more than a footpath.

"Opportunity, James," Silva explains, though James sees little of that, here. "If you are alive, if you have leverage, then all is not hopeless."

James finds the optimism - backed up by the sensible manipulation of his situations to always have access to one, if he had the other - strangely charming. It has an allure when his other option is to retire gracefully into madness. 

It does not much change his disposition toward Silva himself. He does not put his gun away as he follows Silva into the narrow spaces between the trees. Silva goes unerringly, the route remembered well, though James is not sure how. The trees block stars overhead and leave James uncertain as to what they could possibly be seeking.

It is nearly dawn now, and as they come out of the trees into rows of reaching, waving corn, the sky is turning orange at the edges, the sun beginning to reach up into this small, isolated world.

It's a farm, James discovers, hidden away like the books his father used to read him before he slept, a paradise in the woods that would make Tolkein proud. James finds it unconscionably droll.

Silva turns for the barn, careful to go around a small staked up garden of tomatoes. James' stomach protests that he has not put anything but an average martini into it for some long hours. 

"Where are we going?" James asks, eying the small green fruit for any prospective edibility.

"The channel tunnel," Silva informs him, pulling the barn doors open, taking one while he glances at James to take the other. Inside, curious horses peer over stall doors and James hopes Silva does not intend for them to _ride_ to wherever it is they are going.

In the last stall is an old automobile covered in a tarp, and James balks.

"I'd rather we stayed in the Aston Martin," he says, when Silva turns back the cover on the car. It reveals a well-used farm truck with a dented bonnet and a cracked windscreen.

Silva laughs. "So would MI6, now that they have seen us in it."

"Are we stealing some farmer's truck?" James grouses.

"Merely finally vacating a paid stall," Silva tells him. "I'm sure he will be glad to have it back."

The passenger side door shrieks open, admitting James to a musty smelling, well-worn interior. He supposes that MI6 will certainly not be looking for him - or anyone - in a car such as this. 

-

They do not go north, as James expects once they reach the continent, but south - through France and northern Italy, running and running until they reach water. The boat that waits for them is familiar, James thinks. 

Silva proves an adept captain and navigator. James wonders if he still has others in his employ - hands and eyes as he used to. If so, James has not seen them. 

Below deck, the decor has changed from its striking red and gold to silvers and blues, with one coiled _Lung_ statue remaining to guard the bedroom. It is the only reminder of Severine that remains. 

James strips himself bare of his over-worn clothes and climbs into the shower, grateful for the hot water on his filthy skin, to get the grit out of his sweaty hair. It is in need of a trim, he thinks, grown long without the regular cuts he indulged in when he found his appearance more of an investment than at current.

He is aware of the other presence in the room before he hears the outer door click closed, and James almost indulges in a smile.

"How you're thinking of your training now," James says, without looking around. Negative reaction would only encourage Silva. "I know this trick, Raoul."

"You caught Severine with it," Silva agrees, moving closer to the glass shower stall. He is studying James' body, but his eyes are cool - it is a measurement, rather than a come-on.

"You've been in some trouble since our run in," Silva observes, his eyes on the scar on James' thigh, on the tilt of his hips to favor the leg. He has observed enough of James to know to look for the injury. 

"I hope MI6 didn't shoot you again," Silva continues, when he has mapped the keloided skin with his eyes. 

"It hardly matters who it was," James answers sharply, "it was MI6 that euthanized me for it."

"You have a great gift for resurrection."

"You are very badly diseased with life," James retorts.

"Then perhaps we should cling to life as fiercely as it does to us."

Silva reaches up to undo the buttons of his shirt - he had changed from his jumper before they boarded the Eurostar.

James narrows his eyes. "I'm not interested in power struggles. I'm already following your lead."

Silva sheds the shirt and turns around, and his back is a wreck of old scars, his shoulders cut deeply with marks that are ragged, that trail down his back toward the tailbone and only lighten incrementally. James knows which mark to look for. 

It is not quite parallel to the spine, and off-center as Silva had told him. Well, it had been enough to stop him in the instant he had needed to be stopped.

"Not bad, for a physical wreck," James observes - he is not wholly certain if it's an assessment of his skills with the knife, or Silva's fitness despite the clear amounts of abuse written on his skin.

Silva pushes first, stepping through the glass door into the shower behind James, and leaving him with a choice of demurring and admitting his bluff, or revealing that he is not in fact bluffing.

James Bond had not been playing a hand he didn't have.

-


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> James rouses slowly, in the heavy white sheets that seem to stay cool against his body, even shared. His bad leg aches deeply, his back is sore. It's been a long night. James shifts, taking stock of the aches in his limbs and finds that some of the heaviness is not his own.
> 
> A body lays sprawled and possessive over his own, and the world seems to be moving in slow, lazy motions.

3.

James rouses slowly, in the heavy white sheets that seem to stay cool against his body, even shared. His bad leg aches deeply, his back is sore. It's been a long night. James shifts, taking stock of the aches in his limbs and finds that some of the heaviness is not his own.

A body lays sprawled and possessive over his own, and the world seems to be moving in slow, lazy motions. 

Silva - breathing not so deeply as he would be if he were truly sleeping, but certainly drowsing. He has relaxed, boneless and comfortable, half-over James' body. The comfort is as much an act of will as James' own. They are yet predators, and lowered guards could still be met with teeth.

"Is this how you pictured your retirement, James?" the voice is quiet, eased against James' side with a puff of warm breath, and James strokes his hand soothingly, instinctively, over the broad plain of Silva's back, wishing he would either shut up or at the very least stop rolling his 'r' sounds.

The question cannot go unanswered, and it sits heavy and hooked into his mind until James determines why it agitates him. 

"Mallory told me I should start a family," James grouses, and it still feels like a rebuke. The misunderstanding of a nuclear mind and an atomic being. Silva meets the information with a chuckle - a lazy thing that mimics his posture.

James supposes that is an indirect answer to Silva's question at best. It is not a topic he has given much - or any - thought to. James had never pictured an idyllic retirement, even when M had ordered a bullet through his shoulder. Even, he allows, when Vesper had tempted him to resign.

"Do you mean to tell me you intend to retire?" James deflects, turning the veiled question back onto Silva. He knows it was meant to gauge his intents, to learn his plans for the future. It's only fair that James returns the inquiry. 

"I supposed that I might survive long enough to have the chance," Silva answers, "but I also supposed that I might not. I invested in both."

He was wiser than James - who had no investment in his future that had not included MI6. He supposes, thinking distantly of his first days as a 00 operative, that he was always more content to gamble than save.

"What will you do now, James? You have burned your bridges."

He looks down at the top of Silva's head, at the dark, long roots showing the true black color of his hair. There are a few strands of silver growing bright and blending into the artificial blonde. 

"Build new bridges, I suppose. Will your timed programs continue to make trouble for MI6?"

Silva stretches awake fully, gathering his limbs back to himself. He sits up, a low growl as the motion wakes his own aches to life and momentum carries him naked from the bed and across the cabin's floor. 

"They should," he admits, recovering a robe in silk and embroidery, slinging it over his shoulders. "As for bridges, James, we can better build them together, hmm?"

Silva turns, an expansive gesture that does not take him any closer to the coffee maker that James hopes he is heading toward.

"I will provide the engineering," Silva asserts, confidently. "And you the labor."

-

For a time, they sail what seems like an aimless course. It may simply be that neither cares to decide where they are going, or that it does not much matter where they do. James finds the sight of so much water soothing, until it begins to drive him mad.

"Do you intend to sail until we have to fish for food?" James demands, when next he catches Silva tutting over maps and headings.

He looks up with a brilliant smile, enjoying the flavor of James' ire, enjoying that James refuses to reduce himself totally to the position of follower by _asking_ where they are headed rather than simply expecting to be told.

"Do you think you could manage a pole?" Silva asks, enjoying his chance to play at lewdness and poke James' pride as well. 

" _You_ seem to think I can," James answers, sourly. He has been too long in only Silva's company, with only the sea to look at. Unrest is stirring in his soul. 

"I suppose I may have said something to that effect," Silva allows, before he pushes the nautical maps toward James. 

James looks at them, though he cannot hope to read them he can at least look at Silva's marks and try to make sense of what he's expected to see.

"Another island?" he guesses, when there is a clear circle and latitude and longitude notes over what appears to be empty ocean. 

"Yes," Silva agrees. 

James does not satisfy him by asking how many he owns - he doubts they are obtained through pure wealth, and better that way. Money drew lines, lines drew eyes, and James does not want to be seen - at least by MI6 - for a while.

He hopes Mallory is damned angry.

"Don't you ever want to spend time in the civilized world?" James grouses.

"I've just spent two years as the captive of your civilized world," Silva answers. "But yes, James, I take your point." 

He takes James' point and leaves it to one side, unaddressed. Apparently, he will have to wait and see. James leaves him to his maps and plans, and he steps out on deck. The air is salt-fresh and cool, rifling James' hair and tugging at his clothes.

There is no sight of land, nothing but water on the horizon in front of them, and James stalks along the railing to watch the wake stirring behind the ship.

He has come this far without much thought, running on instinct and drive. With no goad, it is burning out, momentum halting. Even the evidence that they are running on full steam, full speed, does not quite sooth his predator's heart.

He supposes that's what he can expect from hiding and running - bursts of nothing around the small moments of excitement. He curls his hands around the railing. 

"Come on then, James," Silva purrs, from very near - not so close as to jump Bond, but he had intruded close enough to make a move if he wanted.

"Come on and what?" James snaps, irritated with his own distraction.

"If you're so eager for civilization," Silva begins.

"I'm just tired of your company."

Silva laughs, and desists from his original course of conversation. He steps up to the rail next to James, watching the wake spool out behind them.

"Shouldn't you be piloting your boat?" James asks.

Silva shrugs. "It is the open ocean, and there's nothing to hit."

That it is the truth makes it no less annoying.

"What is it you usually do when you are bored, James?" Silva strikes to the heart of the problem, unerring. "When you are frustrated, but must wait?"

James runs a droll eye over Silva, his long hair and expensive - ugly - suit.

"I usually don't volunteer myself into such isolation," James answers.

Silva chuckles. "There are books, a satellite television."

James does not bother to dignify such options with an answer. If he'd wanted to read or watch television, he would have stayed retired.

"Do you not find your evenings satisfying?"

"You're tamer than I expected."

Silva laughs at the accusation, allowing himself to be provoked. He reaches out to work his fingers into the curve of James' spine, finding the bruise he had left with his teeth. The scratches made by his nails had been transient things, lines left in angry red and quickly faded.

"Didn't you want gentle?"

"Did I ask for it?" James snaps, irritated by the intimate touch, by Silva's refusal to become the blunt, blinding force he had once been. He had been so adept at quieting James' mind with his quickness.

Silva pinches his side hard enough to force a wince, to catch James' attention.

"And I didn't ask for your passivity," Silva retorts. 

He leaves James to to his restless thoughts, then. To the movement of the water and the tension of his thoughts and muscles.

James snorts, knowing the goad had been meant to sting his pride, to whip him to action. To now, they have been playing careful parts, without risk. An agents' game to play only at lazy seduction. Knowing they are stuck companions has James walking the line very carefully - no risks, he realizes. How dull.

They knew each other's bodies, the clinical tricks of anatomy that they have been trained in. Not a single surprise between them - they had, after all, learned in much the same way. 

It was a far cry from knowing what they truly liked. Normally, James would not care. It didn't matter in the slightest. They did not have to enjoy - more than the basic mechanics required - fucking each other. It was a game with no stakes, like friendly poker. They would work together anyway.

James allows he is not bored to restlessness, normally. He has only waiting to look forward to. Perhaps he can lay some stakes then; fight to be more than the tool Silva had accused him of being.

Perhaps proving himself - _involving_ himself - was part of what they were both waiting for. It isn't up to Silva to lead them, it is just as much up to James to _drive_ them forward.

It will at least be something to do. A game, where the rules are known by both parties and so must be bent until one side forgets they are playing. James turns from the rail into the challenge, stalking Silva's path into the cabin. It is a unique challenge, but James' years have given him some faith in himself. 

-

This time, James does not merely participate. He has been given a target for his frustration and a chance to burn off the growing restlessness in him. He takes it, pinning Silva down into his own expensive sheets.

Silva is smiling, vicious and victorious, when James bites him, laughing as his shirt tears and James growls, and it only amplifies his hurry. Silva pulls his shirt off in return, pulls at James' belt until it comes free from its loops and yanks on both halves of his fly until the zipper creaks open.

He shoves his hand into the confines and finds James already hard. Silva encourages him with a light scratching of nails over thinly clothed skin, and the sensation seems to run up the length of James' spine like an electric pulse.

James twists his hips away, shoving Silva down in warning.

"So rough this time, James?" Silva purrs, as James yanks his pants off, discarding them over the edge of the bed. His own follow.

"Good," Silva concludes.

"Tell me something," James says, pawing through the clutter in the top drawer of Silva's nightstand. It consists mostly of lewd items - anal beads, handcuffs, a pair of lace-trimmed underwear that James decides he will make Silva wear on some occasion. "Did you really _know_ I would rescue you?"

Silva chuckles, delighted with the question. It flatters his ability to read and predict his enemies. James recovers lubricant and a condom from the drawer, after much digging around.

"Expected," Silva agrees. "Hoped. But who can really _know_?"

James does not argue that Silva seemed to, more often than not. He has flattered the man's ego enough for a day - forever, if he can manage it. He pins Silva beneath him, sinking his weight with no care over Silva's scarred belly. The first squeeze of the bottle produces nothing but a sickly, synthetic odor of cherries. James gives the bottle a sharp, sudden shake, a second hard squeeze and the lube crawls out.

It is a thick gel that coats his fingers, reeking strongly. James wrinkles his nose at it, at the sludgy texture before he decides to make the best he can of it. Reaching back he smears a little of it along Silva's length trying to keep the touch as efficient as possible, enjoying Silva's protesting hiss.

"Your hands are as cold as your heart," Silva complains.

"It wasn't always that way."

"Your hands," Silva purrs, twisting up toward James' touch, "or your heart?"

James does not answer. His hands are a sticky, fruit scented mess. He uses one to prepare himself, roughly, and wipes the other on Silva's chest. It will dry in his carefully groomed chest hair, a sticky mess. Good. Later, when it pulls the small hairs out, he can think of James.

He eases the lubricated condom onto Silva's length, assaulted again by a fruity scent when he opens the package. It is an absurd color that James supposes won’t matter when it's jammed up his arse. 

"Does the idea of buggering a fruit bowl so excite you?" James snarls, annoyed that the man's extravagant idiosyncrasies extend even to the bedroom.

Silva's answer is only a growl as James lifts himself onto his knees, taking Silva deep in one smooth motion. He had been out of practice until a few days ago, but not inexperienced. James refused to be easy with his body, to insist on gentleness. Instead it was easier to take control like his, to show Silva he was not made of glass. 

The first inches are easy, then a slow burn that James takes out on Silva's skin with his nails. It covers his indrawn breath with Silva's own, until Silva gets the hint and curls his hand around James' half-hard cock. His strokes are firm, distracting, until James can move. Until the feeling of pressure and drag decreases.

By mutual agreement they don't go slow or easy - they had played those games of false charm, of slow 00 brand seduction and found it as false as the fruit scent that distracts and angers James now. 

They claw and bite, James leaning down to sink his teeth into Silva's shoulder, and he finds himself suddenly on his back. Silva's thumb pressed into the sharp ache of the scar on James' thigh until his voice tears free with it. Silva fucks him through his agony, through the pain of his most hated weakness, leaning down to make soft noises of praise in James' ear when he cums so hard he sees stars.

At that instant, Silva lets up the pressure on his injury and the sudden relief and release leaves James drifting in afterglow as he hadn't since his teenage years. For some minutes he loses himself, though he is aware that Silva pulls out of him to finish, that he ejaculates on James' belly in the mess already there. 

The smell of sex underscored with the false cherry scent is what drags James back. Silva is gone - despite his disregard for the mess made _during_ the act, he is fastidious afterward. James is dimly aware of running water, of a flushing toilet.

If he did not also have to sleep there, James would wipe himself clean on Silva's expensive sheets. There is a pulsing, residual ache in his leg, that promises not to fade for days, and a cooling, hardening mess on his stomach.

Silva returns while James contemplates what to do in a lazy, detached way. He wears a satiated, relaxed expression as he regards James' spread body. He drops a wet cloth into the mess, with a splatter.

"A fruit bowl, James?" Silva asks, showing a sly smile that looks somehow more at home while his hair is a wreck and he stands languidly naked over James. "You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."

James finishes cleaning the mess from his skin and throws the cloth back at Silva, pleased with its accuracy.

"Your disgusting scented lube," James says. "As if applying the scent of cough syrup will cover the smell of shit."

Silva laughs, discarding the filthy cloth carelessly to the floor. In the morning it will be a cold, wet trap for their bare feet.

"A spoonful of sugar," Silva offers, and then, "it's not just the scent."

James ponders that until Silva joins him on the bed and makes his point by licking it out of him.

-

The island is not as small as the first, and it is not as densely occupied, having only a surplus of massive wind turbines over green and grassy fields that make James' skin itch with the need for human contact. Silva absorbs himself in his equipment for now, returning to his computers like a lost lover.

By now, James knows the plan, knows that Silva intends to deactivate his digital hounds to give them both time. It will keep him occupied, but also give MI6 less of a pressing reason for active pursuit. It will buy them the time to come around and bite MI6 in the ass.

If that is, ultimately, what he decides to do. Silva has made it plain that aspect of the future is in his hands. James is not certain he likes the feel of control in his fingers. It is a slick and dangerous feeling, like oil on his skin. Silva has let him have it, James thinks, because he is relieved to be rid of it.

He breathes salt air, looks down at the ocean, and for now he agrees. It is time to move on. To build new bridges. 

Mallory had suggested James might start a family, and for the first time, James considers it. A family of those considered past their prime, those that the changing patterns of life and technology have rendered irrelevant - so far. 

It is not so hard to think of, with his feet on solid ground and a need for excitement crawling beneath his skin. Not unlike a home for leopards and other big cats. It will be as involved and delicate an operation as such a rescue.

Hardly James' style. Yet, he is satisfied with the plan of action for the moment. If it changes - well. 

James always did his best work on his feet.

-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, folks! I hope you've enjoyed it. I had a good time revisiting this universe and doing something fun for Sfumatosoups, who gave me a bunch of really awesome prompts to work with. It was a total joy to revisit this fandom, and at the very latest I'll see you all again for the next 00Silva gift exchange!

**Author's Note:**

> -A Rimfire cartridge is a specific designation of firing mechanism, meaning the pin strikes anywhere along the rim of the bullet rather than a centerfire cartridge where the pin must strike the center. I chose this in reference to the type of cartridge a Walther PPK takes.
> 
> -This piece is done for the 00Silva gift exchange, and I apologize for it being not only incomplete but very nearly late! This first chapter is unbeta'd, but I will hopefully update it with a beta-read version when my beta reader has time. Life has kind of camped my time hard this month, in a totally unexpected way.
> 
> -The estimate of 3 chapters is only that, an estimate. I am hoping to wrap it up in a decently quick manner, with an update every 2 weeks. Thanks!


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